Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. Over the past decade, he’s noticed a change among his students: They’ve become overwhelmed by the reading. One first-year student shared with him that, at her public high school, she had never been asked to read a single book cover to cover. “My jaw dropped,” Dames told Rose Horowitch. https://theatln.tc/m3YaGD03
Though no comprehensive data exist on this trend, the majority of the 33 professors that Horowitch spoke with relayed a similar experience: Students are shutting down when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they struggle to get through challenging texts like they used to; they can’t stay focused on even a sonnet. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” Horowitch writes, “it’s that they don’t know how.”
One explanation is that middle- and high-school students are encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom. But the decline in reading abilities may also be explained by a shift in values rather than in skill sets. “Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past,” Horowitch continues—and even if students enjoy what they’re learning in literature courses, one professor told her, they want a degree in something that seems more useful for their career. “The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take.”
Read the full story on how a generation of college students stopped reading, from The Atlantic’s November issue: https://theatln.tc/m3YaGD03
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